Our Solemn Hour
by spaceyPsychologist
Summary: Eight years after the 'The Shop' incident, Charlene McGee is asked to join the Six God-Generals after going into hiding, but what happens when The Shop interferes? AschxOC. x-ed over with Stephen King's Firestarter.


**ReimeinoAkatsuki:** Finally, a new fanfiction! This first chapter took quite a while to write, since I got the first scene directly from the book. I altered some of the parts so it's not direct copying and focuses more on Auldrant than the US. The changes are pretty crappy, so I appologize for that. If anyone has any suggestions for improvement, please tell me! I am aware that this will probably suck.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Stephen King's _Firestarter_, Tales of the Abyss, or the song_ Our Solemn Hour_.

**Warning:** Disturbing images. As you may or may not know, Stephen King is famous for his horror novels. _Firestarter_ isn't in that classification, but there is a brief part of violence.

_Sanctus espiritus, redeem us from our solemn hour_

_Sanctus espiritus, insanity is all around us_

_Sanctus espiritus, is this what we deserve?_

_Can we break free from chains of never ending agony?_

_Our Solemn Hour_, _Within Temptation_

A little girl moaned in anguish and exaustion as she stood next to her father. Up until this morning they were hitchhikers being picked up by a friendly farmer named Irv Manders and his sweet wife Norma. Just a normal mid-fall/winter day. Feeding chickens. Petting a cow. Andy or little Charlie McGee didn't know that a small platoon of soldiers were on their way to kill the young girl's father and to capture her. Now she knew, and it was too late. What they still didn't know was that the soldiers lied their way to getting past the guards a duke had stationed. The duke's son, a 9 year-old red-head, snuck out to follow the suspicous men.

"Oh Daddy," Charlie moaned. "I can't hardly stand up."

Her father put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her more tightly against his side.

The first caravan stopped at the head of the dooryard and two men got out.

"Hi, Andy," The first man said, and smiled. "Hi, Charlie." His hands were empty, but his coat was open. There was something about his smile that the blonde and the hidden boy didn't like.

Behind the man was the other man who stood alertly by the caravan, hands at his sides. The second caravan stopped behind the first and four more men spilled out. All the caravans were stopping (They were operated by Fon machines instead of horses), all the men getting out. The boy counted a dozen and then stopped counting.

"Go away," Charlie said. Her voice was thin and high in the cool early afternoon.

"You've led us on a merry chase," Al said to Andy. He looked at Charlie. "Honey, you don't have to--"

"_Go away!_" She screamed.

Al shrugged and smiled disarmingly. "'Fraid I can't do that, honey. I have my orders. No one wants to hurt you or your daddy."

_"You liar! You're s'posed to kill him! I know it!"_

Andy spoke and was a little surprised to find that his voice was completely steady. "I advise you to do as my daughter says. You've surely been briefed enough to know why she's wanted. You know about the soldier at Baticul."

The red-head eyes widened in slight alarm. _What was so bad that a soldier had to be briefed about that a child did?_

Two of the men exchanged a sudden uneasy look.

"If you'll just get in the caravan, we can discuss all this," Al said. "Honest to gosh, there's nothing going on here except--"

"We know what's going on," Andy said.

The men who had been in the last two or three caravans were beginning to fan out and stroll, almost casually, toward the porch.

"Please," Charlie said to the man with the strangely yellow face. "Don't make me do anything."

"It's no good, Charlie," Andy said.

Irv Manders came out onto the porch. "You men are trespassing," he said. "Get the hell off my property."

Three of the Shop men had come up to the front steps of the porch and were now standing less than ten yards away from Andy and Charlie, to their left. Charlie threw them a warning, desperate glance and they stopped--for the moment.

"We're soldiers from the Order of Lorelei (Lies!), sir," Al said to Irv in a low, courteous voice. "These two folks are wanted for questioning. Nothing more."

"I don't care if they're wanted for assassinating the Emperor," Irv said. His voice was high, cracking. "Show me your warrant or get the Yulia Jue (It's supposed to be like saying 'Christ' It sounds so retarded. -_-) off my property."

"We don't need a warrant," Al said. His voice was edged with steel now.

"You do unless I woke up in Keterburg this morning," Irv said. "I'm telling you to get off, and you better get high-stepppin, mister. That's my last word on it."

"Irv, come inside!" Norma cried.

Charlie could feel the power flowing like an electric charge. This power scared her, but she needed to protect her father, Irv, and Norma. Even if she had to let it all go...

"Get out!" Andy shouted at Al. "Don't you understand what she's going to do? Can't you feel it?! Don't be a fool, man!"

"Please," Al said. He looked at the three men standing at the far end of the porch and nodded to them imperceptible. He looked back at Andy. "If we can only discuss this--"

"Watch it, Frank!" Irv Manders screamed. Earlier that day, Andy falsified his and Charlie's names to Frank and Roberta. Now, there was no point in it.

The three men at the end of the porch suddenly charged at them, pulling their guns as they came. "Hold it, hold it!" one of them yelled. "Just stand still! Hands over your--"

Charlie turned toward them. As she did so, half a dozen other men broke for the porch's back steps with their guns drawn.

Charlie's eyes widened a little, feeling a rush of hot air fly away from her.

The three men at the front end of the porch had got halfway toward them when their hair caught on fire.

A gun boomed, deafeningly loud, and a splinter of wood perhaps eight inches long jumped from one of the porch's supporting posts. Norma Manders screamed, and Andy flinched. But Charlie seemed not to notice. Her face was dreamy and thoughtful. A small Mona Lisa smile had touched the corners of her mouth.

Charlie was turning back toward Al again. The three men he had sent running down toward Andy and Charlie from the front end of the porch had forgotten their duty to God, country, and the Shop. They were beating at the flames on their heads and yelling. The pungent smell of fried hair suddenly filled the afternoon.

Another gun went off. A window shattered.

"Not the girl!" Al shoutes. "_Not the girl!"_

Andy was seized roughly. The porch swirled with a confusion of men. He was dragged toward the railing through the chaos. Then someone tried to pull him in a different way. He felt like a tug-of-war rope.

"Let him go!" Irv Manders shouted, bull-throated. "Let him--"

Another gun went off and suddenly Norma was screaming again, screaming her husband's name over and over.

This got Charlie's undivided attention. _They shot Mr. Manders_, she thought, anger taking over her tiny body. She shifted her blue eyes ever so slightly, and found Al with his gun drawn.

Charlie was looking down at Al, and suddenly the cold, confident look was gone from Al's face and he was in terror. His yellow complexion grew positively cheesy.

"No, don't," he said in an almost conversational tone of voice. "Don't--"

_Die._

It was impossible to tell where the flames began. Suddenly his pants and his sportcoat were blazing. His hair was a burning bush. He backed up, screaming, bounced off the side of his caravan, and half-turned to the man next to him, his arms stretched out.

Charlie sent all of her power at Al, shoving it with such force that she almost staggered.

Al's face caught on fire.

For a moment he was all there, screaming silently under a transparent caul of flame, and then his features were blending, merging, running like tallow. The man shrank away from him. Al was a flaming scarecrow. He staggered blindly down the driveway, waving his arms, and then collapsed facedown beside the third caravan. He didn't look like a man at all; he looked like a burning bundle of rags.

The people on the porch had frozen, staring dumbly at his unexpected blazing development. The three men whose hair Charlie had fired all managed to put themselves out. They were all going to look decidedly strange in the future (However short that might be); their hair, short by regulation, now looked like blackened, tangled clots of ash on top of their heads.

The boy was almost in a near state of shock, but had enough sense to get out from the underside of one of the caravans and ran to an area away from the soldiers and the vehicles. Charlie glanced at him, but let him be. She did not need to kill a harmless boy that was unarmed.

"Get out," Andy said hoarsely. "Get out quickly. She's never done anything like this before _and I don't know if she can stop."_

"I'm all right, Daddy," Charlie said. Her voice was calm, collected, and strangelly indifferent. "Everything's okay."

And that was when the caravans bagan to explode. _Yes, everything is okay. These men will never come after us again. Not after I'm through with them._

They all went up from the rear, where the fifth fonons were.

Al's went first, exploding with a muffled _whrrr-rump!_ sound. A ball of flame rose from the back of the fon macines, too bright to look at. The rear window blew in. The second and third largest went next, barely two seconds later. Hooks of metal whickered through the air and pattered on the roof.

"Charlie!" Andy shouted. _"Charlie, stop it!"_

She said in that clear calm voice: "I can't."

The third caravan went up.

Someone ran. Everyone else followed him. The men on the porch began to back away. Andy was tugged again, he resisted, and suddenly no one at all was holding him. And suddenly they were all running, their faces white, eyes stare-blind with panic. One of the men with the charred hair tried to vault over the railing, caught his foot, and fell headfirst into a small garden where Norma had grown beans earlier in the year. The stakes for the beans to climb on were still there, and one of them rammed through this fellow's throat and came out the other side with a wet punching sound. He twitched in the garden like a landed trout, the bean-pole protruding from his neck like the shaft of an arrow, blood gushing down the front of his shirt as he made weak gargling sounds.

The rest of the caravans went up then like an ear-shattering string of firecrackers. Two of the fleeing men were tossed aside like ragdolls by the concussion, one of them on fire from the waist down, the other peppered with bits of safety glass.

Dark, oily smoke rose in the air. Beyond the driveway, the far hills and fields twisted and writhed through the heat-shimmer as if recoiling in horror. Chickens ran madly everywhere, clucking crazily. Suddenly three of them exploded into flame and went rushing off, balls of fire with feet, to collapse on the far side of the dooryard.

_"Charlie, stop it right now! Stop it!"_

A trench of fire raced across the doooryard on a diagonal, the very dirt blazing in a single straight line, as if a train of gunpowder had been laid. The flame reached the chopping block with Irv's axe buried in it, made a fairy-ring around it, and suddenly collapsed inward. The chopping block whooshed into flame.

_"CHARLIE FOR LORELEI'S SAKE!"_

Some Shop agent's pistol was lying on the verge of the grass between the porch and the blazing line of caravans in the driveway. Suddenly the cartridges in it began to go off in a series of sharp, clapping explosions. The gun jigged and flipped bizarrely in the grass.

Andy slapped her as hard as he could.

Her head rocked back, her eyes blue and vacant. _What the--?_ Then she was looking at him, surprised and hurt and dazed. She couldn't think clearly, couldn't see clearly. All she recognized was the pain. She focused her energy on the person who had hit her, until her eyes cleared up. It was her father, fear in his eyes.

Charlie staggered on her feet and put her hands up to her face. And then, through her hands, came a shrill, building scream of such horror and dismay that Andy feared her mind had cracked.

_"DAAAAADEEEEEEEEE--"_

He swept her into his arms, hugged her.

"Shhh," he said. "Oh Charlie, honey, shhhh."

The scream stopped, and she went limp in his arms. Charlie had fainted.

About three yards away, Luke Fon Fabre, later to be self-renamed 'Asch', backed up slowly before running. No one was to know about this. Ever.

Charlie shot up as the repeated nightmare ended. She had been having this dream for so many nights that she had lost count. Setting the Manders' farm on fire, killing a man, almost killing her _father_...It was enough to make her shudder.

Sweat poured down her face, her blonde hair sticking like wet paper.

"Charlie dear, are you ok?" came the voice of Norma Manders. Charlie swiftly tied up her hair in a long pink ribbon, then nodded. The elderly woman walked over and placed a hand on her forehead. "That dream again?" The blonde nodded. Norma smiled apolagetically. "Don't worry about it anymore, Charlie. That happened years ago. We don't blame you for it."

Charlie nodded, fighting to keep the tears down. "Oh, Charlie, some very important people are coming tomorrow--No, they're not from the Shop." She added at the look of panic that crossed the girl's face. "Now, let's go back to sleep." Before the door closed, a faint voice said "Thank you, Norma..."


End file.
